


Dressing an Open Wound

by clockheartedcrocodile



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Dry Humping, Loneliness, Masturbation, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 19:14:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12488896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockheartedcrocodile/pseuds/clockheartedcrocodile
Summary: "You don't need to be touched," he said quietly, very quietly. "Nobody needs sex to live. If you think otherwise you're a fool and a bleeding heart."-In which Percival Graves is alone.





	Dressing an Open Wound

**Author's Note:**

> Please enjoy this 4.5k of self-indulgent touch-starved Graves fic, which was at one point 7k but I had to cut a bunch of cool wizard stuff out in order to make it readable.
> 
> This is also my first time writing smut, so be aware. 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr at @clockhearted-crocodile, if you are so inclined.

Graves was a lucky man in many ways. He had money, a home, and food on the table. He had the respect of his men, and even their love. Magic ran through him like a vein of gold.

And that was all a man needed, wasn’t it? Food, shelter, clothing, magic. Graves had been dwelling on these things for longer than he should, watching his paperwork mice scamper in circles atop his desk. He had everything he needed. Which was why his last arrest had been so troubling.

His name was Anaximander Akker. He had no friends, no family, and was four weeks off the boat from Rotterdam. Not twenty-four hours ago he had set off a bell jar full of highly dangerous bark-skin fungi in a crowded hotel. Upon contact with the pearly-white mushrooms, a witch or wizard’s skin would seem to ‘dry’ into a hard, bark-like shell, which would crack along the veins. Thanks to Graves’ team and their quick response time, disaster was averted.

Akker, apoplectic with fury, half-blinded by the incandescent light of Graves’ mushroom-wilting _mycotus redactus_ , had grown desperate. For a brief, dizzying moment, Graves thought he was going to rush him, and the thought had made something empty yawn open inside him, pleading to be fed.

 _Yes,_ he found himself thinking, _yes, God yes, here are my eyes, blacken them, drop your wand and go for the knockout. Put your knee in my belly and bruise me good._

But the moment was there and then gone in a flash of brilliant red light, and Akker dropped to his knees, stunned, eyes rolling in his sockets. Graves’ wand was still raised.

They had not read him his rights when they arrested him. In Picquery’s America, criminals did not have any.

The thoughts he’d had . . . they were troubling. It was more troubling still what had happened when he’d come into the office that morning, and one of his men— which one was it, LeBlanc, yes, that was it— had clapped Graves on the shoulder like a friend.

It had felt like someone had poured hot water down his back. Graves flinched, but made it look like a shrug, and the hand dropped away.

That had been hours ago, and still, Graves was dwelling on it. How long had it been since someone had squeezed his shoulder? He couldn’t remember. But he knew as well as anyone that it shouldn’t burn, that it shouldn’t remind him of things better left unattended.

 _Buried,_ Graves amended in his mind, things better left _buried,_ not unattended. Burying was a kind of attending-to.

He began to forge a path through his inbox with a fraction of his usual attentiveness. At the top of the stack was a note from Queenie, Ms. Goldstein's sister, inviting him to some sort of get-together that night and asking if he still played the guitar.

Graves frowned. He hadn’t played since before the War, and he could not recall ever telling her that he had played at all.

He tucked the note away and pushed it from his mind. Attendance was out of the question. Picquery had been on his case about taking a day off for weeks now, and tomorrow was the day she had finally chosen for his sentence. Besides, Graves was working late. He was always working late.

It was good to have a reason not to attend. It meant Graves could wipe his hands clean of the whole situation. When Queenie came around an hour later to deliver the coffee, the only acknowledgement he gave to the note was a curt “I don’t play the guitar anymore,” to which Queenie nodded, smiled sadly, and backed out.

*

It was nearly midnight before Graves had finally emptied his inbox.

His hands were cramped and aching, his eyes unfocused. When he finally leaned back in his chair, his spine creaked in frustration. He hadn’t intended to stay this long.

Graves stood up, slowly, and resented the groan that escaped his lips. He was becoming an old man. Nowadays they had every manner of soothing spell for aching bones and cramping fingers. They came in blue glass bottles, with names that conjured up images of warm baths and long evenings watching fireflies on the porch.

Graves did not like them. Such potions were for old men, and the implications of buying them frightened him. Besides, he thought bitterly, he didn’t want a warm bath or an evening on the porch. What he wanted could not be bottled.

He put on his coat— it settled warm and heavy across his shoulders, Graves had always insisted on such coats as this— and left his office, winding his familiar way around the empty desks and unlit lamps of the bullpen to reach the elevator. He did not bother to conjure himself a light; he was too well used to leaving work in the dark.

“Good evening, Red,” he said to the operator. “The citadel.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Graves,” said Red. These were the only words Red had ever said to him.

Graves stood in the elevator with his hands behind his back and watched the floors go by. Tonight, of all nights, he felt he wanted to say something else. “How’s your family?” He asked.

Red gave him a look. “Your floor,” he said coldly, as the elevator rose into place with a satisfying click.

Graves didn't make eye contact with him as he left the elevator, tugging his coat more firmly about him and buttoning it up tight. There had been a time, when he was a young man still breaking in his auror leathers, that Graves had disliked the citadel at night. The sigils that hung like dewy spiderwebs in every window gave what little light crept in a sickly greenish color, as though the entire building had sunk to the bottom of a lake. The ticking of the MEC seemed louder in the darkness, and somehow more final. Now and then Graves heard the distant sound of footsteps echoing up from the Drop at the center of the room. The night shift had arrived four hours ago.

"Good night, Mr. Graves," said the night shift doorman. He had an ugly smile, but a genuine one.

Graves paused. He had not been wished good night in some time.

"Good night," he said, his eyes flickering to the doorman's name tag. "Stebbins."

He stepped out alone into the night.

It was snowing outside. Graves realized that it had probably been snowing all day, but, his office being several floors underground, he hadn’t noticed. Already the shoes of innumerable passing New Yorkers had browned the snow into a sticky paste under his boots, the rest of it piling up in fat white heaps along the sides of buildings. It reminded Graves a little of Akker’s sticky, bubbling mushrooms.

It was cold. The snowfall was gentle but insistent.

Graves felt, as he stood outside the Woolworth, that the last thing in the world that he wanted to do was go home, lay down in his bed, and let the empty winter take bites out of him until he fell asleep.

The thoughts came rushing in, too many and too fast for him to stop them from running away. God, snowy nights were so beautiful and cruel. _God,_ Graves wanted to hold somebody. Anyone, anyone. He wanted to bury his nose in someone’s hair and breathe. He wanted to rest his head against someone’s chest and sleep till sunrise. How long had it been since he’d felt another man’s heartbeat against his own? How long had it been since a boy had kissed the corner of his mouth and pleaded with him to cuddle just a few moments more?

Years, Graves thought wearily, as he began the long walk down the road to the nearest safe apparition point. It had been _years,_ since before the War, even. He had been handsome then, with hair dark all the way through. Romances had started passionately, and ended with generous kisses and honest admonitions of to-thine-own-self-be-true.

No one would kiss him now. No one would keep him warm at night, or welcome his attentions when he grew hard. That was for young men, with beautiful faces and eyes that had never seen war. Those kinds of boys _deserved_ to be held during cold winter nights. He knew that. He’d made peace with it.

And now look at him. He knew he had the respect of his men. He knew he even had their love. And yet . . .

"You don't need to be touched," he said quietly, very quietly. "Nobody needs sex to live. If you think otherwise you're a fool and a bleeding heart."

 _You don't need to be touched,_ the night air seemed to whisper back at him. The chill was intolerable.

Graves, shaking slightly, tightened his scarf around his neck, and found it felt a little like someone’s hand around his throat.

The shops on Rook Street never closed, not even at midnight. Perhaps he could be discreet.

*

Rook Street was made to be walked. Apparition was an impossibility, but for the gates at either end. Graves knew the route well, but he could recall being a young man in the city for the first time, carefully noting the complicated tangle of alleyways on his hand in quick-drying ink. Left, right, left, left, right, and turn . . .

The street was not so different now than it was then. The snow wasn’t dirty brown here; it fell even and thick, enough to be pretty but not quite enough to be cumbersome. The pavement had never seen an automobile.

But the shops, Graves considered, as he hurried through the snow to his destination. The shops had changed dramatically. They were crammed tightly together, stacked on top of each other like playing cards, and everywhere Graves looked, signs that had never needed neon to glow were proclaiming things like _SPELLS FOR SWELLS_ and _HASTING’S HAWK SHOP_ and _MISS TABITHA’S TINCTURES,_ _SMOOTHER THAN DUCK SOUP_. Every third storefront was a pub, many of them less than a year old, all of them glorying in their own free and fearless existence. Look at us, look at our magic and our gigglewater. Ain't nobody gonna shut us down.

The shops were full of wide, bright windows, and behind every pane somebody was selling something. Tonics and tinctures and potions by the score, enchanted soaps and magic razors, mirrors that talked back and seemingly a thousand variations on the popular self-cleaning cauldron. In many of the windows wax mannequins stood admired but untouched, modeling hats and scarves, or fine English-style robes that swept the ground. Graves could hear them whispering to each other as he passed.

The street was oddly empty tonight. Graves picked up his pace, clenching his fists in the pockets of his robes. He murmured a spell to himself— softly, softly, just a little cantrip— and smiled as he heard the falling snowflakes begin to melt with soft hisses as they landed on his shoulders. No wand necessary. His particular, private skill.

Though he would never have voiced it out loud, Graves had cultivated his skill with wandless magic for one reason alone: it felt personal, almost intimate. It was so easy to forget that the wand you used to wash your dishes is the same wand you might use to kill a man. You could be casual with a wand. Vague thoughts of Intent, when channeled by a wand, could become tangible, real-world Influence.

A wand stood as intercessor between a wizard’s Intent and the world around him. They only really breathed when they had magic running through them, when a wizard let his magic flow from his core to his hand, from his hand to his wand, and like _that—_ magic. Kettles became kittens, ashes became trees, paint on a canvas found its tongue and spoke with it. Yet wands were cold, impersonal things. At Ilvermorny, Graves had been taught to consider his wand more valuable than his own right hand, but which was more valuable to a lonely man late at night?

The shop he was looking for was, he had been told, a ‘witch’s shop.’ It was a shop for irons that did their own ironing and china that did its own washing. More importantly it was a shop for soft things, luxurious things, things that might make sleeping alone more bearable.

That was what it was all about, in the end. Sleeping alone. Graves forced himself to confront the thought, before filing it away.

It took him a good ten minutes to find the shop he needed. The shop was called The Birdhouse.

*

Graves didn’t stay long. He bought pillows, good ones, with pillowcases that enchanted them for easy transfiguration. “Any shape at all, hardly any know-how needed,” the witch attending to him had said, waving her wand and making the pillows expand or shrink, lengthen or curve into shapes. One of them swelled to the size of a couch, another seemed to fold in on itself until it became no larger than a pincushion. “Which of them were you thinkin’ of, sir?”

“The big one,” Graves said quietly.

He also let her talk him into a blanket, “Which,” she said proudly, “has been enchanted just so. Here,” and she placed it, folded neatly in a bundle, in his arms.

Graves, who had good arms for a wizard, nearly dropped it. “I, oh,” he grunted, adjusting his grip. “This seems a little much.”

“It's weight changes,” the witch explained, “based on the wizard’s Intent. On that side. On the _other_ side,” and here she took it from him, seemingly with no trouble, and re-folded it with the other side facing outwards. “Now try this.”

The blanket burned when he touched it, like the hottest bath he’d ever taken. Graves shuddered involuntarily. “Does that . . . also change according to Intent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll buy it.”

She had packaged them neatly in two white bags, stamped with matching golden birdhouses and twittering mid-flight birds. "Have a good night," she'd said, as he'd stepped out into the darkness.

Graves cursed Rook Street for its lack of apparition, quietly, so she wouldn't hear. "Rook Street was made to be walked," he muttered. It was such a point of pride for the residents.

He would have gone home, quickly and quietly, without touching any life other than his own, if he hadn't heard the singing.

He hadn't been walking long before he heard it. It was distant, but loud, and full of a merriment that Graves didn’t feel. It was the absolute last thing he wanted to invite into his life, not now, not tonight, when all he wanted to do was go home and quietly collapse in on himself.

He found his feet carrying him towards it anyway.

The singing was coming from one of the pubs, the Arrow’s Rest. There was laughter, too. They were having a good time. Light was spilling out from the windows, shining off the snow and casting Graves’ long, narrow shadow behind him.

He tucked his bags under one arm, to muffle the birdsong.  _There’s Queenie,_ he thought numbly. _And Miss Goldstein._

Inside he saw aurors, all of them men he knew. There were a lot of them, sitting at the bar, or clustered around tables. All of them singing and laughing and talking over each other. One of them— LeBlanc, again— had brought a guitar, and was strumming it idly by the far wall. Graves could not hear it through the glass.

He could hear Queenie, though. All eyes were on her. She captivated every room she entered, and it was never more plain than here. Graves saw the way her hair shone in the flickering lamplight, soft and inviting. He could not bring himself to chase the thought away.

She was leading them in some popular song, and the song went like this:

 _I’m going to follow the boys over there!_  
_Anywhere, I don’t care!_  
_I’m just dying for one little dance_  
_But all my dancing partners are—_  
_Some-where-in-France!_  
_Oh!_  
_I’ve never nursed anyone I’ll admit_  
_But I’m ready to do my bit_  
_And if one little kiss or more_  
_Can help them win the War?_  
_Oh!_  
_I’m going to follow the boys!_

Graves couldn’t hear the guitar from the street outside, but he could hear the laughter. They were so happy, in there, and they touched each other without fear of rejection or flinching away. Some of the men had brought their sweethearts with them, and they were sitting in their laps, arms looped around the necks of their fellas. What would it be like, Graves wondered, to be so loved, that someone would touch him like that in a public place and think nothing of it at all? The thought of a young man squirming in his lap again, touching his chest, his head, made him feel weak.

They’ll see me, came the thought, with a jolt of real panic. He couldn’t be seen like this, creeping through the snow outside the window, looking in at something sacred. Graves forced himself to leave, his teeth gritted, his eyes narrow against the snowfall.

Their voices carried on the night air, and lingered long after he’d gone.

 _Where are the boys who used to hang around me?_  
_You used to see them anywhere you found me_  
_Lately I’ve been lonesome and shy_  
_There’s not a single fella in sight_

*

The lights in his apartment were out, as always. They flickered to life when he crossed the thresh hold.

Graves dropped his bags by the door and shed his coat, not fully aware of anything he did. He knew he felt quite dead, but that was only an academic observation, as though he were viewing himself from a long way off. It was another feeling to file away, in support of his continued effectiveness at work.

 _You have the day off tomorrow,_ a very small voice in the back of his head told him. _Picquery demanded it. No point in filing anything away now._

Graves filed that away too. He went to the water closet, took a piss, went to the kitchen to look for some food and couldn’t remember if he’d taken a piss or not.

“It’s just fatigue,” he said, out loud to his empty apartment. “You haven’t been sleeping well,” he added, because talking made him feel less alone.

The icebox was empty. He returned to the water closet to take a shower, which he did not feel.

He climbed into bed with his hair still wet, and there, snuggled under the too-light blankets of his too-wide bed, he let out a choked sob.

Graves sat upright, hand on his mouth, suddenly aware of the silence of the room. It had sounded ugly and strangled and sad, like a stifled sneeze. And it didn’t even make sense, because he wasn’t, he wasn’t—

He wanted to say “I’m not grieving,” out loud in the empty room, but it would’ve sounded childish, and Graves couldn’t bear to hear his voice say childish things. Tears were for grief, there was no other excuse. Papa had taught him that; a man sheds no tears unless they’re to grieve for something dead.

He hadn’t moved his hand from over his mouth. He could feel the heat building behind his eyes.

It didn’t make sense, it didn’t make _sense,_ that his body should betray him like this when, of course, his reason told him he wasn’t grieving. The last time he’d cried had been at his father’s funeral.

 _Papa._ Thomas Graves had been tall and warm and built like a stevedore. He had seemed to be made of smiles, but they were fleeting, almost apologetic. He gave them in secret, as though smiles were something sinful. He had been a good father in many ways.

And Graves knew, he knew because his father had told him, that men only wept out of grief. _But no,_ Graves thought desperately, _no, no, they cry on their wedding day. They cry in the trenches. They cry when they hold their child for the first time. They cry . . ._

Graves wondered if Papa had cried when he’d held _him_ for the first time, and the thought of it broke him.

He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. It was like he was losing something that had been infecting him, but was nonetheless irreplaceable. His heart felt as ugly and open as a lanced boil.

Graves lay there for a long while, tears ruining his eyes, and when his hands grew too sticky he buried his face in his pillow. He wanted to be held, he wanted to be _held,_ but to be held was to show his own weakness. It was a desire which necessarily required someone else, but it was a desire that he could only hope to satisfy alone.

No, not satisfy. Control. Graves bared his teeth into his pillow and groaned. There was no satisfying it. There was only killing it slowly. And if killing it slowly meant killing his heart . . .

Well, he didn’t need one anyway. It didn’t belong to anyone but himself.

Graves pushed himself up, his eyes wet, his mouth dry. Slowly he put his legs over the side, stood up, shuffled to the door where he’d dropped his bags. Dragging them back to the bedroom was an ordeal; the one with the blanket was nearly too heavy to lift.

 _According to the wizard’s Intent,_ Graves thought bitterly. _It knows I want it to smother me._

He put the pillow on first, and ran one hand down it. Magic grew hot in his fingertips, and, as advertised, the pillow transfigured like matches into needles, growing a little longer than Graves was tall and as thick around as a man’s torso. The blanket he spread weight side up.

Graves crawled underneath it and let out a long, low breath. At the moment, it felt better than anything he could’ve hoped for. Big and all-encompassing and _heavy._ He could feel it pressing him into the mattress, as though someone much younger, much more _magical,_  were holding him down. _Not in a cruel way,_ he thought, his eyelids growing heavy.  _Not cruel . . ._

He was dimly aware that he hadn’t fallen asleep this quickly in years, and that was the last thought he had.

*

When Graves awoke the next morning, his mind hazy and his eyes heavy with sleep, he silently thanked Picquery for demanding he take the day off.

He had rolled over in the night with his back to the pillow. He could feel it now, pressing up the length of him from behind.

Carefully, as though trying not to disturb someone deep in sleep, Graves rolled over. He nuzzled a little closer, the weight of the blankets pressing down on him feeling almost like being held. He felt sure that if he opened his eyes, the illusion would break, but for now he contented himself with cozying up with the pillow, pulling it close with both arms and burying his face in it, as though it were the nape of some warm boy’s neck.

He put one leg over it to tug it even closer, imagining he could twine their legs together. Graves let himself press a kiss to its silk pillowcase, just once. He could imagine, imagine . . .

 _God,_ he didn’t want to imagine, because imagining was like giving up, wasn’t it, it was like admitting his weakness, his need, his _everything . . ._

But he was already growing hard, his cock was starting to press insistently against the pillow, aching for a wet, tight heat that wasn’t there, and Graves would’ve cried again from the frustration if he’d had any tears left.

Slowly, painfully, he began to grind against it, his hands clutching it closer and exploring it, seeking warm skin, a stampeding heartbeat. He imagined hands exploring him in turn, hands that cupped his face and traced the curve of his ass. When he pulled his boxers down to free himself, Graves let himself dream, for a moment, of a sharp intake of breath as someone saw him, the rough, ragged breathing of a man enraptured with lust.

Graves mounted the thing— _like an animal,_ he thought madly— and began to grind more insistently against it, his mind on fire, the world around him narrowed to a single bed, a single fantasy, a single moment. The blankets on his back crushed him against the bed, and he had to strain to prop himself up on his hands. He thought for sure the veins in his arms were standing out under his skin.

Graves clutched the pillow closer, pressing into it, desperately imagining the warm, welcoming heat of a boy’s hole, the tight grip of him as he slowly opened up to Graves’ thrusts. The blankets were like an embrace grounding him as his fantasy lover cupped the back of his head and pulled him down, whispering hot in his ear, I want you, you’re welcome here, you’re safe, you’re loved, give me your intimacy and let me cherish it.

He buried his face in the pillow and imagined he smelled his lover’s sweat. He kissed till his lips were dry and imagined his kisses were returned.

“G-god,” Graves choked, “God, please . . .”

The grinding wasn’t enough anymore and he began stroking himself as fast as he could bear it, his other hand fisted tightly in the bedsheets, imagining it was someone’s hair. “Please, please, please,” his voice now muffled by the pillow. “I c-can’t come like this . . . not like . . .”

He imagined the weight of the blankets to be a soft hand in his hair, another hand running down his back, gentle, loving, twining between his legs to soothe his trembling thighs. It’s alright, his fantasy seemed to say, you can come like this, you’re not weak, you’re my king, my knight, fill me up, fill me till it’s more than I can hold, I love you, I love you, I love you.

That was all it took.

Graves came in thick, wet ropes, his face flushed hot with shame, the words he knew he’d never hear still throbbing in his mind.

He collapsed at once, the weight of the blankets on his back finally too much for his aching limbs, still shaking with the aftershocks of his release. For a long moment he lay there, sweat-slick and breathing heavily, acutely aware of his seed cooling on his hand and on his slowly softening cock.

Slowly, very slowly, Graves pushed himself into a sitting position. Crawling out from under the heavy blankets made him feel very small.

The chilly air of his bedroom bit into him like it had been waiting for a glimpse of his belly.

Graves took his wand from the bedside table with the intention of cleaning himself up, but the thought of it made his heart ache. He went to the water closet instead and cleaned himself gently and thoroughly with a damp cloth, as though he were dressing an open wound. It was the kindest he had been to himself in days.


End file.
